I had visited to see the cherry blossoms in 2017 and felt that we were going too early but actually made it for the peak. It’s scary how quickly the dates are shifting.
I wonder what impact the earlier blooms have on the trees over the coming years, as this does not seem to be natural.
We have a cherry blossom tree. It bloomed a week earlier than last year. We’re not in Kyoto but I did notice and it’s a bit strange. I also noticed some other blossoming trees that typically bloom for about a week, went green after 3 days.
Climate is also dimensional. Kyoto is a point. A point over time is a line, a line through a 3d set of data. That a single point is seeing an effect is interesting but not as significant as widespread changes. Only when multiple measurements create a 2d map of realtime data, which becomes a 3d bulk over time, should we draw conclusions. Sadly, that is also happening. But the later should be the topic of conversation, not a single very visible data point.
If these events where random noise then they would distribute in both sides of the climate models; We don’t observe that. Events only seem to match or be worse than expectations.
A 1200 year time series.. that's climate.
Much shorter periods can of course also be considered as such. I suppose exactly how short is subject to some debate.
Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668
My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.